


The Wake of Vox Machina

by amberwoods



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Multi, Vox Machina Are Gods
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-04-24 01:07:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19162705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amberwoods/pseuds/amberwoods
Summary: Over five hundred years ago, the heroes of Vox Machina put themselves into an eternal slumber in an effort to break the gods' ties to Exandria. They put all gods to sleep, freeing the Exandrians from the reach of Vecna and other evil gods and stopping their cults for good. In performing such a feat, they became gods themselves, and as such went to sleep as well.But now, suddenly, they are awake. And despite the fact that they all know this is bad news for Exandria, they are ecstatic to see each other again.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! Me again, back at it with divine aesthetics, tooth-rotting romance and lots of tears. I don't know where this fic is going, exactly, so for now it's just One Big Reunion fic, and we'll see if they actually get to fighting the evil that has awoken them again. Enjoy!

Vox Machina wakes. 

Percival rises from smoke and ashes in the forge of Whitestone castle, in the dead of night. Through some passing miracle, no one is around to see him form out of thin air, smelling of dynamite and brimstone. 

Keyleth's roots pull back into her body. Her bark turns back into skin. Her branches retract. Her face emerges, then dozens of arms, which slowly turn back into two. She stays rooted until the moment her eyes open, when her feet trunk splits into legs again and she can feel the dirt between her toes where she stands a foot-deep in the earth.

Grog digs himself out of the fresh overturned earth of a recent battlefield, the taste of blood and adrenaline in his mouth. He opens his eyes to a dark sky, laying on his back in the carnage, surrounded by discarded weapons and the errant cut off limb of a soldier. 

Vax'ildan falls from the sky in a cocoon of feathers. He does not know how long he has been falling for as he wakes - he just knows to spread his wings and catch himself before he hits the ground. As he does, he catches his first glimpse of the endless ocean underneath him. He is drifting between the clouds on his glowing raven wings, disoriented for but a second before he focuses and uses every muscle in his body to _move._

Vex'ahlia is pulled together from the roars of a family of bears, twisting into existence as her bones snap into place. Her body regenerates at an immense pace, perfecting her up to the bright blue feathers in her hair. Her longbow is strapped to her back with her quiver of arrows and she breathes in the earthy, fresh scent of the deep forest around her. Around her, the bears roar again - a call into the world that their mistress has returned - and from the woods around her, an immense spectral brown bear emerges, his eyes locked on her. 

Scanlan steps out of a bookcase in the romance section of a public library in the middle of Tal'dorei's capital. His skin is paper, first, but strengthens as it turns human once more, and the lines scratched across him disappear. His third eye opens before his regular two do - and with it, he searches for the last one of them.

* * *

Pike wakes in her crypt, her hand bursting through the stone of her mausoleum and grasping her mace in one smooth destructive movement. She gasps, inhaling the cold air into her lungs with a vengeance. Her eyes burst open and she grips her mace harder, the feeling of it in her hand familiar and comforting, even in the shock of rebirth. Immediately she starts coughing, dust of the stone she destroyed trying to make its way into her lungs. She sits up straight, pushing the material off of her and wiping it from her eyes with the back of the hand holding the mace. Once she feels a little less disoriented, she opens them again and looks around the room.

Her mausoleum looks the same as when she went to sleep. A little older, of course, worn by age. It is cold and dusty and some weeds have managed to worm themselves in through the cracks in the stone floor. She knows immediately that it has been a long time since anyone has set foot into this building. She can feel it everywhere around her - the utter silence. The emptiness. 

They would never wake. This had been their promise when they went under; the price they paid for the peace in the world. This should not be happening. 

Pike coughs again and gets up out of her stone coffin. Her armour is spotless and heavy on her body. She clenches and unclenches her fists for a moment, enjoying the sound of the metal as it creaks. She looks around the room for a moment and then leans back against the edge of the coffin.

This should not be happening. This was not what was supposed to happen. 

Her thoughts reach for her family and she feels her heart lurch. If she was awake, they would be too - and they could be together again. She could see them. 

Immediately, she is overcome by yearning, and part of her mind begins to think of ways to reach them. She is not entirely sure where all of them were buried, but she would find them. Scanlan would know.

 _Scanlan_.

He would come for her as soon as he could. She knew it. He would be here any second now, probably.

But fear creeps up on her again, and she feels a shiver run down her spine as she remembers, in full force, that no matter how happy it makes her, this _should not be happening_.

They would never wake...

Unless the peace they fought for had been destroyed. Unless the gods had found this plane again.


	2. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: full chapter of pikelan ahead. If you're here for the pikelan: enjoy, my loves. If you are not: you have been warned.

Pike hated waiting.

She was a little embarrassed that even now, when she was practically a god, she couldn’t bring up the patience to sit quietly for a little while. But, in her defense, she was waiting for someone who she hadn’t seen in over five hundred years. And waiting… it reminded it of when she was little.

Littler, of course. Grog would say tiny. The smallest of gnomes. Back when her parents locked her up in a tavern room and told her to wait for them to return (bloody and bruised and possibly intoxicated) ten hours later. Waiting made her feel small.

It wasn’t so bad if she had something to do, but having just waken up from a five hundred year long nap in a stone mausoleum, there really wasn’t much to busy herself with. She scraped up some of the stone dust that she left behind when she broke free from her slumber, but other than that she was stuck just… looking around.

And overthinking.

She felt like her frown might be etched into her forehead for another half a millennium by the time that something in the air seemed to _shift_.

She was leaned back against her tomb again, holding up her mace and wondering whether there was anything she could do for it without any resources. It looked sharp enough, but it _was_ covered in dust, and perhaps if she took off some of her armour she could bunch up her tunic and start cleaning with it.

But before she even remembered she might not want to greet her friends half-naked, the air around her mace seemed to crackle.

Her eyes widened. This mace wasn’t like some of the vestiges her friends used, a weapon that evolved and changed over time. It was as awake as it would ever be. So the arcane runes that started hovering in the air around it, growing bigger every millisecond, couldn’t have come from there.

Her subconscious caught up before her active thought process did and she felt excitement bubble up in her chest as she watched the arcane runes settle on the stone floor in the shape of a large circle. They were golden, and gorgeous, and they sparked with purple like a small fire being fed dry wood.

A flash of light overtook the room and then her vision of the runes was obscured by the person in front of her. He was gripping her mace with the same familiarity that she was, his hand just above hers, their fingers almost touching but not quite. A vibrant eye made of purple light was staring at her from his forehead, but he had his eyes closed in concentration, a small frown between his bushy eyebrows. Her lips parted as she quietly looked over his face – the big nose, the long eyelashes she had always been jealous of, the pronounced cheekbones, the pouty bottom lip that had tempted her a million times over. She brought her gaze back up to his eyes just in time to watch them open.

The moment Pike locked eyes with Scanlan Shorthalt once again, her throat expelled a strange, pained groan that sounded suspiciously like a choked-back sob. She could see a strange fire light inside his soul when he registered her standing before him, the power of his affection flowing from his gaze as he, too, looked at her. The glow of his third eye slowly disappeared until he was all skin and bones again.

The shock of seeing him shut down her brain temporarily. She was incapable of coherent thought, even as he looked her over and slowly slid down his hand on her mace until it covered her own. At that, another one of those sob-like sounds, this time louder, echoed through the cold stone room.

She could not explain how overwhelming it was to have someone touch her. Although the last five hundred years were a blur, her body seemed well-aware that it had been ages since she had felt that connection. Emotion welled up in her unbidden, and she swallowed back her tears until she saw that he had not deemed such a thing necessary.

Scanlan was crying. Full, hot tears were rolling down his cheeks as he stared at her, his own jaw slightly slack as well.

“Pike,” he croaked out, and she wondered what would happen if she tried to speak.

Pike brought her free hand up to where he had laid one of his own over hers and put it on top of them, trapping his hand between both of hers. Her voice quivered. “Hi Scanlan.”

Scanlan cleared his throat and her favourite lop-sided smile appeared on his lips. “You have aged exceptionally well, miss Trickfoot.”

She let out a breathy chuckle. “Yeah, well. Petrification does wonders for your skin, apparently.”

He reached out his hand and, feather-light, traced his fingers down her cheek. “You don’t say…”

There was so much tenderness in her voice, and the space between them seemed static with emotion. Pike let out a full sob now, pushing closer to him and pressing her forehead against his with a clumsy bump. Scanlan let out a shuddering breath at the contact and she wanted nothing more than to see those dark brown eyes again, but her own eyes had closed somewhere in that motion and she was far too overwhelmed to open them.

For some reason, she felt incredibly heavy. She felt _exhausted_. Absolutely tapped. Inside of her, her emotions were roaring through her body like a thunderstorm.

She felt Scanlan’s hand grab her by the waist, and then he was wrapping his full arm around her, burying his face into the crook of her neck. She could feel his tears against her skin. Her mace and their hands were trapped between their chests now. She could feel them move as they breathed in tandem. She had never been this happy to be alive before.

Soon, he lifted his head slightly to nuzzle her cheek with his nose. “Pike, you’re freezing,” he told her, sounding a little bit worried.

He _did_ feel very hot against her. Like he was running a fever. But maybe it was her.

“Must be the stone,” she answered hoarsely.

Scanlan let go of her to wrap his second hand around their already intertwined them, making it a pile of four, like they were playing the game they used to play when they had a boring watch together. He was like a charming little hand warmer.

He was frowning again, though, going over something in his head. “I don’t think I have anything to help with.”

“I’ll warm up naturally. It’s okay.”

He looked her in the eye again, searching for something. He looked so damn hopeful that it was almost heart-breaking.

“This isn’t a dream, right? We’re really awake?”

“I think so… Unless _I’m_ dreaming.”

He couldn’t help but smirk at that, it seemed. “Do I show up in your dreams regularly?”

She smiled back. “You’re like herpes. Just can’t get rid of you.”

He pulled a face and she laughed – her first laughter in five hundred years. It felt absolutely perfect.

“Cruel, cruel mistress,” he told her playfully, and bumped their foreheads together again.

“I’m so happy to see you,” she whispered back. Watching him cry set her off as well and she could feel the tears start rolling down her face. He couldn’t resist letting go of her hands so he could wipe them away.

“Not as happy as I am, Pike. I don’t know what to say.”

“Me neither.”

They smiled at each other in silence for another little while.

Then, reality seemed to set in.

Their smiles dropped almost simultaneously, and she would have felt weird about how in sync they were, as she always did, if it weren’t for the million other thoughts that were clamouring for her attention.

“Are the others up too?” she asked.

Scanlan brought his hand to his mouth and gently bit down on his thumb. “I haven’t checked yet.”

She flushed a little at that admission, at the implication of it considering that he was standing right in front of her, but refused to acknowledge that response. “Could you do it now?”

He nodded. “I think so. The eye, it…” On his forehead, the purple light appeared again and his third eye dashed open. “It doesn’t really need to recharge anymore. Or maybe I’m just using some energy stored up over the past few centuries. Who knows. Give me a second.”

Scanlan focused, his eyes glazing over, and Pike wondered how he had known that it had been centuries since they went to sleep. She wondered how _she_ had known. Because she did know – she knew full well that it had been five hundred and thirty two years since they had laid down their futures for the rest of Exandria. She couldn’t have said how many months it had been on top of that, but she knew the amount of years perfectly. It was strange.

Then again, she supposed waking up from a never-ending sleep spell was strange on its own. It was bound to have some side effects.

Scanlan hummed, still looking like he was seeing an entirely different scene than she was.

“What is it?”

Maybe he couldn’t even hear her. It wouldn’t surprise her.

But, no, Scanlan held up a finger to tell her to wait another second – irritation spiked, of course. She wasn’t a patient woman.

“Everyone’s up,” he then said.

Relief washed over her. Part of her had still been afraid that one or more of them hadn’t risen from their slumber. She wasn’t sure she could do this without all of them here.

“Where are they?”

“Percy’s in a cellar somewhere. I think Whitestone, looking at how fancy the place is dressed up. Might even be his own workshop. Keyleth… Keyleth’s in Zephrah. As for the other three, I can’t really pinpoint it.” He frowned. “There’s no real landmarks. Vax is somewhere over an ocean. Vex is in a forest. Grog… On a recent battlefield? In a carnage somewhere, at least. Lots of blood. Lots of gore. Kind of nauseating, to be honest.”

“Focus.” Pike put both of her hands on his shoulders, staring into his unseeing eyes. “Can you figure out where he is? Grog?”

“I don’t have to know where he _is_ to bamf us to him.” Scanlan reached up and scrambled for her hands, pulling them from his shoulders and holding them loosely in his own. “I just need to…”

“To what?”

Scanlan blinked, and when he looked at her again she knew that he was back. She suddenly noticed their faces were pretty darn close together at this point.

If she blushed a little at that realisation, she would never be the one to point it out.

Scanlan seemed to notice, though, because he also flushed – he always did when he saw her blushing. It was a strange comfort. True gnome solidarity right there – at least she never looked like a fool on her own.

It was a little intimate, though.

“To zone in,” Scanlan said. He nodded towards her mace, which was now resting on the floor between the two of them. “Like I did with your toy, there.”

“Don’t call it a toy.” She pulled a hand free and knocked him on the shoulder.

“ _Ow_.” He reached for the place where she’d touched him and looked at her like she had offended him in his soul. “Be careful there, hon’, I’m still as weak as a dish rag.”

“I think you lost the right to say that the first time you took the full force of a fireball and managed to just brush it off.”

He pursed his lips. “Party pooper.”

“You did it to yourself, friend.”

Pike could imagine Vex in the back of her head. _You hear that, Scanlan?_ Friend _, she said._ She thought Scanlan must have heard it too, because he got the same hurried look on his face.

“We’ll pick up Grog first.”

“Yes, please.” She was itching to get to her brother.

She could feel the magic in the room rising and – okay, looked like they were going right this instant, apparently.

“Maybe we can catch him before he kills someone,” Scanlan added as he started concentrating. The next words from his mouth were undeniably arcane, a language that she could follow but never truly speak. He was moving his hands frantically in the somatic components of the spell.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she said.

Scanlan sent her a look that she took to mean _fair enough_ , and then the world disappeared in a flash of bright purple light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's what I've got so far, folks! Next up: finding Grog!


	3. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scanlan and Pike find Grog and do some magic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Took me long enough! Finally I got this second chapter underway. Grog was hard! I'm hoping the rest of them will be a lot easier. Enjoy!

Even before she opened her eyes, Pike was struck by the _smell_ of the place. She had been in a fair share of battles in her time, ones where countless lives were lost and entire cities were levelled, but she had never gotten used to the way the rest of the world seemed to disappear on a battlefield. Places like this, they were black holes – they sucked in all the light and life around them. Their energy spread like a cancer. They oozed despair like the Shademirk Bog had oozed in the Feywild before they cleansed it.

The smell was one of blood and metal, fire and gore, fear and piss. Human remains in every sense of the term. She gripped Scanlan tighter in the moment before she opened her eyes to face the carnage.

It was past midnight where they were now. They were standing in a field that was covered, _covered_ , in bodies. There were remains of creatures of all races, together with mounts, discarded weapons, banners, keepsakes, rags… Bodies were piled together like rocks. Whatever battle had taken place here, it had been recent, and it had been huge.

Pike felt the weight of every single lost life come down onto her soul and it almost sent her to the ground. Her knees buckled, her stomach lurched, and she remembered that right before they came here Scanlan had said something about the place being _nauseating._ He had been absolutely right. It was horrible.

Scanlan was gripping her as tightly as she was holding him, but he was looking around analytically, scanning the landscape around them. Pike followed his gaze and now noticed that there were still people moving around over the field. Some of them were walking regally, their hands up in the air, magic coming from their fingers tips. _Clerics,_ she knew instinctually. They were performing after-battle rites. Probably trying to help the souls of the lost move into the next world – or at least keep their bodies from being taken into un-life. She had performed those rites countless times. She had carried their burden. Her heart ached for those who were carrying it now.

There were also skulkers, though. Creatures that were stealthily making their way through the area, reaching down and grasping for things. Collecting things. Looting.

Another wave of nausea hit her and she felt the anger rise in her chest. Disrespectful, vile, horrible people. This was not a place to gain favour from. This place should not be fertile ground for anything.

Before she could do anything, though, Scanlan tugged at her and nodded towards a small group of creatures a couple of hundred feet away from them. Four skulkers, it seemed, with one of them in a very precarious position – two feet off the ground, held up by the scruff by a man far larger than him. A man whole-heartedly familiar.

Pike’s heart cried out for Grog the second she saw him, but she also realised that he was about to make a mistake.

 _No more death,_ something inside her lamented, _this place needs no more death._

Pike and Scanlan glanced at each other and then set off running, as fast as their gnomish legs could carry them.

It was hard – between the body parts they almost tripped over and the remains they had to swerve around, their way was far from straight and simple. Grog’s hand had moved from the skulker’s scruff to the base of his skull.

“ _Grog!_ ” Pike yelled out, putting all of her breath and power behind the word as she shot it out into the darkness.

Grog’s head turned towards them at the sound of her voice, but Pike could tell from his stance that he was just _so angry_ , and it was hard to get through to him at times like those. Hard to break through that red-hazed tunnel vision.

Pike pointed at him as she ran, panting. “Put that down!”

Beside her, Scanlan led out an astonished chuckle at her shout and she was brought off balance by it for a moment as well. It was so simple to yell for Grog to stop acting like a doofus. It was so familiar. Like they’d spent no time apart.

“You heard her Grog!” Scanlan followed up her shout with his own, “Put down that disgusting creature! You don’t know where it’s been!”

Grog’s face, which had been twisted with rage, smoothed out into something of a blank slate before his lips formed into a trembling pout. He dropped the man he’d been holding and turned his back on the three others around him without concern.

“Pike!” he roared out across the field, capturing the attention of some of the clerics that were a little ways away and making them jump, “Scanlan!”

He started bounding towards them, showing next to no care for the despair he trudged through. He was too focused on his two favourite people coming towards him. He ran so fast he almost tripped and Pike choked back another sob as she sprinted towards him. Soon enough, they were upon each other and Grog dove to the ground to sweep both gnomes into his arms and up to his face.

“Buddy!”

“Grog!” Scanlan said with a big grin, “Oh, I’ve missed that handsome mug of yours!”

There was something painful about having this reunion in the middle of this field, with the smoke still rising from small fires and the souls of the lost soldiers hardly across the borders of the afterlife. This place needed no more death, yes – but this felt strange as well. This happiness.

But how were they supposed to be anything but ecstatic?

Scanlan laughed, but Pike said nothing and just cried into Grog’s shoulder, hugging him tightly to herself. She was emotional to an extent that she wasn’t entirely comfortable with. Too much was happening. She couldn’t keep up.

“I wasn’t sure where you guys were,” Grog said, sounding slightly out of breath, “I went looking for you, but I couldn’t find you.”

“I’m sorry, Grog.” Pike sniffed loudly. “We were a little ways off. We went to sleep in different places, remember?”

“To sleep?” Grog frowned at them, looking confused.

Pike felt like a trickle of ice water ran down her spine. She just stared at him, speechless.

Scanlan was a little more put together. “You don’t remember?”

Grog looked them over for a bit and then shrugged his shoulders. “I know we did that spell or whatever. To kill Vecna. Little bitch. But then I was here, in the ground.”

“In the ground?” Pike asked, her voice trembling.

Grog nodded. “Yeah. I woke up in the dirt.”

Panic rushed through her as she tried to imagine what that would be like – waking up disoriented, in the ground, in a place like this, with no sense of time or what had really happened, and no one around him. It must have been horrifying.

Scanlan was just nodding. “Yes. We were trying to put him to sleep, remember? We put all of the gods to sleep, and that way they’d never fuck anything up again.”

Yes – that had been the plan. It was a good plan. Solid. The right thing to do. The heroic thing. The only catch was that they’d had to go to sleep as well. And that was a sleep… a sleep they weren’t supposed to wake up from. It was like death. They had died for this.

Pike was struck again by how they probably didn’t deserve this kind of happiness – this reunion. Their family, together again. That was not the deal they had struck.

Grog nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I remember. Did it work?”

“It looked like it,” Scanlan said, “But if we’re awake now, then who knows. Vecna might be too.”

That was a scary, scary thought. Could all of their work really have been for nothing? Was Vecna just… back? Had he broken through?

“I don’t… _feel_ like he’s around,” Grog said.

Pike blinked at him. “What do you mean?”

Grog shrugged again, jostling the gnomes in his arms. “You know. It doesn’t feel like he’s up, is all.”

Scanlan nodded slowly. “Yeah, I… I think I get what you mean.” He looked at Pike. “I don’t feel his presence here. I used to – before we went to sleep. He always had this sort of stench around him.”

Pike frowned and thought about that. It was true that when Vecna was around, there had been this… fear in the air. Something almost tangible. But if no one knew he was back then it made sense that no one was scared of him. He was probably no more than a story to the people who were alive now. Although that was underestimating the life span of a lot of creatures, maybe. Gnomes could live hundreds and hundreds of years. Keyleth was supposed to too, originally. There might be people who remembered to be afraid.

“We can’t be sure,” Pike said finally, “There has to be a reason we’re awake. It might be Vecna.”

“It could be anyone.” Scanlan bit his thumb again. “If one God wakes, they all do, maybe. Then we’d wake up with them.”

“But then Vecna _is_ awake, isn’t he? By that logic?”

Scanlan hesitated. “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe we’re just the first line of fire. Since we’re the ones who put them all to sleep, if one of them is waking up that would undo our feat of power and un-godify us. That could be why we’re up. Doesn’t mean _all_ of the gods have to wake up immediately. We could have just been demoted once there was a crack in our system.”

Pike tried to wrap her head around that. It didn’t seem right, but she couldn’t put her finger on why exactly. It was hard to think of herself as a god, but still, there was… There was something fundamentally different about her. There was a part of her that she didn’t recognise – something new. If that wasn’t godhood, then what was it?

“I have no idea what you just said,” Grog told Scanlan.

Scanlan shook his head, clearly still thinking about it. “Let’s just find the others first. They might know something we don’t.”

That seemed unlikely to Pike. If Scanlan couldn’t figure it out, she doubted whether any of the others could.

But… She did want to see them. So very badly.

She was about to agree and tell Scanlan to take them to the next place when her eyes fell on one of the bodies on the ground. Very briefly, from the corner of her eyes, it had looked like it had moved.

Pike froze in Grog’s arms and stared at the limp remains on the overturned earth. Nothing moved.

Suddenly, she felt this need to do something. She wasn’t entirely sure what, but her body was itching to make something happen. And she thought she’d better let it.

“Can you let me down for a bit?” she asked Grog, “Before we go?”

Her brother seemed reluctant to let go of her, but he did as she asked and put her down on the ground. Now she was out of the comfort and warmth of his arms, she could feel the icy cold of this place again. Their shared happiness had been a moment’s respite – this place was too full of agony to sustain it. But… maybe she could do something.

She closed her eyes and reached out with her mind to the places around her. There was light, still, hidden in the wreckage. There was always, always light. And where it wasn’t, she would bring it. She would gift it to this place.

The time of dying was over. The healing started now.

Light gathered around her small body. She pulled it out of the ether – she dragged it out of her own soul. She took some from Grog, and from Scanlan, and from the clerics walking the grounds. She took some from memory and some from hope, and she made it all into a little sun that she carried inside of her chest. From there, she let it shine – she let the light pour out again and touch the world.

She was a vessel. She was a star. She was a conductor.

Pike felt spectral wings of light sprout from her shoulders and she wasted no time before lifting up into the air. From that position, the light could touch even more space and she put everything into making it as strong as possible.

There would be no death here. No un-life. This was the start of recovery. This land was for the living – or it would be again.

She breathed in the darkness and breathed out light, and once she was satisfied, she came back down to earth.

She became aware that some of the clerics had stopped to stare at her. A few of them had gone to their knees. The power that flowed through her was intoxicating, but she felt clearer-headed than she had since she’d woken up in her tomb a while back. She felt, strangely, like she knew what she was doing.

Or she did, right until the moment she saw Scanlan and Grog again.

Grog was merely grinning and gave her a thumbs-up when he saw her looking. He looked at her like he always had when she did something cool – just like she did something cool and he thought it was cool.

Scanlan, though, looked at her like she had just put the sun back into the sky after an age of darkness. His gaze was bright and awe-filled. His entire focus was on her form as she slowly drifted back down to them and she noticed that his third eye had peeked out again, as though he hadn’t had enough eyes to see her with. As though he needed to become more just to grasp what he was seeing.

She was a little self-conscious by the time she touched the earth again and she wiggled on her feet for a moment, trying not to look at Scanlan but finding herself unable to look away for long. She kept glancing at him and seeing her own power reflected in his eyes, and it was strange, and exhilarating, and she wanted more of it. She wanted to look at him until the dawn of another age.

Finally, Scanlan cleared his throat. “Still gods, then,” he said hoarsely.

Grog nodded like that made perfect sense, and Pike felt a blush rush onto her cheek. She felt a little proud  of what she’d done – she knew this place needed no more rites after this. She had cleansed it entirely in just a few minutes. Deep down, she knew that what Scanlan said was true – no mortal could do the thing she had just done. They were still gods. At least she hoped they all were. It would be incredibly lonely to be the only god amongst them, now.

But one more glance at Scanlan’s third eye and she thought she knew better than to think herself alone. None of them were mortals now.

Scanlan shook his head for a moment and then clapped his hands together. “Alright then! Time for another magic trick. A bit less impressive, of course, but we can’t all be angels of light and healing.”

He wiggled his fingers and, around the three of them, the arcane runes started appearing in their sparkles of golden and purple light. His hands went through the somatic motions of the spell and Pike quickly turned to Grog.

“We’re jumping,” she said quickly, trying to prepare him, before they blipped out of the world in a spark of magic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you guys enjoyed that!!

**Author's Note:**

> Hope that was as fun as you guys as it was for me!


End file.
